


A Pyrrhic Victory

by quicksparrows



Series: Side by Side – Chrobin [24]
Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Angst, Gen, Spoilers, wahhh wahhh wahhh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-05
Updated: 2015-11-25
Packaged: 2018-04-02 23:17:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 10,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4077526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quicksparrows/pseuds/quicksparrows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[Spoilers for ending.] After the victory speech, Chrom takes off his crown and grieves. [A collection of ficlets around the topic of sacrifice and resurrection.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pyrrhic Victory

**Author's Note:**

> Barf, look at all this angst. Chrom's pretty chill in the ending for someone who, you know, potentially got promised there'd be no martyrdom going down only for it to happen anyway. By his best friend and possibly wife. Who he has children with. "Lol it's okay she'll be back." Come on, Chrom. Have a lil emotion. Wallow in the pyrrhic victory. 
> 
> I might add to this one with more chapters, but it'll probably be less a chapter story and more an anthology around the same theme of "the time where the Avatar wasn't back [yet?]". It's certainly not going to be in chronological order or anything.

“Chrom?” Lissa says. It’s a little meek, but a great deal concerned.

“Yes?” Chrom replies. It’s a little too cavalier, coming off the high of a public speech.

Lissa doesn’t seem to know what to say from there, not with Chrom’s placid expression. How to ask him if he’s alright when he seems so completely unruffled? How to trouble the notion that he’s fine with having just seen a good comrade – and friend and wife and mother – vanish into the aether, potentially losing her forever? 

Doesn’t that kill a man inside, at least a little bit?

It certainly did when Emmeryn fell. Chrom hadn’t been so relaxed then, when he was a prince and not the Exalt, but he’d still buried his grief under duty and determination and all those things.

Now, it seems positively eerie that he can even smile, mere hours after losing his wife. It’s a dead smile, blank and plastered on like his jaw is made of stone, but it’s a smile nonetheless. Grima is gone forever, but at such a personal cost –– a cost he had railed  _against._

It turns Lissa’s gut into knots more than her own grief does.

So Lissa turns her eyes to Frederick, maybe a little desperate. Surely he has something to say?

“Milord,” he says, calm but serious. “It's not every day a man fights a Fell Dragon. You need to rest. You have wounds that need tending to.”

“They’re fine,” Chrom says. Then his voice is quieter: “I’m alright, Frederick, I need to see that the rest of our allies are settled, that it’s safe to make camp… we probably lost part of the convoy, so maybe we’ll need to locate supplies.”

As if Chrom has ever had anything to do with the convoy beyond owning it. Lissa looks up at Frederick again, but he keeps his eyes settled on Chrom. The silence that follows is almost painful, and Chrom takes a few steps across the floor, closer to the war table, and he looks away from them to fix his gaze elsewhere. Lissa takes a tentative step after him, but he turns his back completely.

“I can assign another detail for supplies if you’re concerned,” Frederick says, “but Cordelia is already seeing to it.”

Chrom gives a little noise of acknowledgement, and then he adds: “You can see to it yourself, too. And Lissa, I’ll need you to, ah…” He pauses, and between the high backs of the chairs Lissa can see a stack of Ada’s books. Chrom rests his palm on them like he’s pinning them in place, the muscles in his arm tense, that one cut on his lower arm oozing blood. “Uh, see that we have enough fires, I guess.”

Lissa rolls her bottom lip between her teeth for a beat, just to keep herself from saying something rash, but it comes out anyway: “Chrom, this is crazy.”

“Thanks,” he says, absently.

Lissa’s mouth falls open, and when she’s sure that the tension in the room will cut them all to ribbons and she just wants to pound her fists against his chest until he has a  _reaction_ , Frederick lays a broad hand on her shoulder and she’s momentarily grounded.

“We’ll leave you, then, milord,” Frederick says.

“I don't want to leave him!” Lissa says, somewhat louder, and the first tears roll then, but Frederick uses that broad hand to steer her out by her shoulder blades. He pushes her right through the flap of the tent door, despite her sniffles, and on the other side of the door they wait.

Not ten seconds later, they hear the crash of those books toppling over. Thirty seconds pass like hours, and Lissa just grips Frederick's arm like she's six years old again and not a woman who has long outgrown her guardian. Inside, there's another crash that sounds like a chair toppling over, and then a strangled yell of pure pain, something deeper and more raw than the cut on his arm. 

"Give him a moment," Frederick says, "just a few minutes."

So they wait. Sumia joins them shortly after, practically tiptoeing over, big eyes round with concern, as does Say'ri with a look more solemn than usual, and the four of them wait some more. 

"I feel terrible," Sumia says, "He sounds like he's in so much pain. This should be a happy time, but..."

"Six of our party members grievously injured, ten more with minor wounds, and the rest exhausted just the same... and one gone." Say'ri pauses. "Where are their children?"

"Lucina and Morgan are in the healing tents with Maribelle," Frederick says.

"Are they okay?" Lissa asks.

Inside, books are being torn.

"They'll be fine," Frederick says. "They've survived worse already."

The four of them cringe together. 

"What are we waiting for?" Lissa asks, feeling testy again. "We should be with him."

 "You know as well as I do that he would never allow himself to appear weak before another, after this long campaign," Frederick says, and then he sighs. "Though I loathe to hear it." He puts a hand to Lissa's shoulder blades again. "Go, see to him, then. Sumia, Say'ri I am sure Lord Chrom would appreciate--"

 Lissa doesn't wait for Frederick to finish; she pushes back through the flap of the tent door. Sure as it sounded, two of the war table's high-backed chairs are knocked over, and the books are knocked asunder, many split on their spines. One has a great deal of pages torn out –– her notebook, Lissa realizes. Had there been some clue? Had she planned it all along? Could he have changed her mind somehow?

 "Chrom," she says miserably, to her very miserable brother, who is on the floor with one hand gripping the table top and the other clutching his own face. Lissa sinks to her knees in front of him, skirts settling around her, and she lays a hand on his knee.

 "She promised me," Chrom chokes out. He's shaking, and Lissa reaches for his hand. He lets her take it, his fingers winding around hers. With his eyes red and his nose running and mouth twisted into a grimace of pain, he hardly looks like her brother at all. Her brother is always either dead serious or smiling. 

 She hasn't seen so much as a tear out of him since Emmeryn died.

 "I know," she says, and she shifts to wrap her arms around him. He hardly budges either way, but that's okay. "She lied, but she did it to protect us."

 "Protect us?" Chrom is angry again, even through his tears, and he moves as if to wrest Lissa from him, but he stops short of even jostling her. "Protect us! We were a hair's breadth from sealing Grima away for a few hundred years, we did not need protection!"

 "Protection for our children," Lissa reminds him, as gently as she can. She could tell him that it was him who wanted a permanent solution until it was personal, but she doesn't want to fight him. That won't help. "For their children, and theirs, and theirs."

 This time Chrom does pull himself from her arms, dragging himself back a few feet on the floor, and he snaps: "What of our children? A baby at home, two more here, another unborn?"

 "We have to believe she'll come back," Lissa pleads. "Chrom, shh."

 He's like a boy again, not a man with grown children, weeping messy tears on the floor, angry and grieving. Anyone would be -- Lissa could only imagine what she would do if her husband were to do the same to her. Could there be anything more bittersweet than saving the future at the cost of your dearest one?

"I thought I could be sure," Chrom says, "but then..."

He trails off.

Lissa moves to him again, and this time, Chrom reaches to hold her, choking on his own breath and dampening her shoulder. She just keeps her arms around him. It's the same way they were years ago when Emmeryn fell, but this time she's the one protecting him.

 "I'll plead to Naga," Chrom says, finally. "I'll throw my own life down, if need be."

There's the rustle of the tent flap opening behind them, Lissa looks up expecting to see Frederick, but no –– there's Lucina, echoing her father's emotions but with command over herself. She looks down at Chrom and shows grief for a moment, and then seems to steel herself.

"You will do no such thing," she says.

Chrom seems at least momentarily pulled together by his daughter's presence, and he thumbs his own tears away and sits up straighter. 

 "Lucina," he says, and he doesn't look at her.

 "Grima is dead," she says. "Grima will never terrorize this land again, and it has come at great personal cost." Her own eyes are glittering with tears, too, and she stands over her father with clenched fists. "Once, I have lost you, and twice, I have lost my mother. I will not lose you again."

 Lissa looks down at her brother nervously, and he says nothing. He dares look up at his daughter now, though, and she meets his eyes as boldly as a child can in the face of such emotion from a parent.

 "You are the strongest man I have ever known," Lucina says, and now she's weeping, too, though her voice remains resolute. "Have your grief, but then you must be strong again, and prove our bonds are tight enough for her to come back to us."

 Chrom breathes deep and drags himself to his knees, and Lucina reaches for his hands. He takes them and she helps him up. He stands with burdened shoulders and aches and pains, but he stands nonetheless. Now looking up to him, Lucina adopts more concern.

 "We will weather this together, father," she says, and Chrom nods with some difficulty before pulling his daughter into a brief hug. Then he reaches down for Lissa's hands, pulling her to her feet with them.

 "We will," he says, finally. "Gods, this hurts."

 "It will for a long time," Lucina says. Perhaps forever. Sadness could never truly be forgotten, after all.

 "It's embarrassing to be seen like this," Chrom says.

"Well, at least Sumia didn't punch you this time," Lissa says.

That gets the barest crack of a smile.

 " _What?_ " Lucina says, taken aback. Chrom starts to explain.

_He'll be okay,_  Lissa thinks.  _Someway, or somehow._


	2. Anathema

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chrom wants to make the final blow. She's not so sure he can do it, or that it's the best course of action.

"Do you really think you can do it?"

The question burns in Chrom's ears. It's worse when he knows she's been thinking it for hours, maybe longer, just waiting for the opportunity to spring it on him when they have privacy. Pride swells in his chest, and his voice comes out even but indignant:

"That's not _you_ , Ada. It's Grima."

"It's Grima in my body," Ada says, slow and careful, like it hurts her to have to say it at all. She's looking at him from across the war room like she's wary of getting any closer -- he knows she's been struggling these past weeks especially. She's been afraid to get emotional, afraid that any moment not spent in hypervigilant awareness is a moment of weakness for Grima to exploit and overtake her. She's told him that over and over again, if not in words then in the way she's kept him at arm's length: she's afraid. Oh gods, she's so afraid.

"I am in there," she says. "The person I am -- _that I could be_ \-- is in there. She might even be _aware_."  
  
"Why are you telling me this?" Chrom asks. He can't even mask the feeling of impending betrayal: he has been worried about her coming to this conclusion for a long time, and now it's finally here. He stares her down. "Why are you trying to talk me out of this?"  
  
"I want your convictions to be true," Ada says, ever the philosopher queen to his warrior king, but she's lying. He trusts her implicitly, but he also trusts her to have bigger plans than he does. "I don't want you to have regrets. I don't want you to be hurt, I don't want you to be haunted by that mental image. You know how hard it is for me to think about when I killed you."

"You _didn't_ kill me," he says. Not in this timeline. Not in this universe. That's all that matters to him, anyway -- she is Ada, the woman he found in the field, whose life began when he pulled her to her feet. Anything before, here or in another timeline, is irrelevant. (She hates that he thinks that, he knows, but she knows that is the type of person he is, and he can't change that.)

"Chrom, please," Ada says. "I don't want to have that argument again."

Chrom paces the room like a caged animal, and then he rounds towards her again.

"She's _not_ you," he insists. "I will land the final blow."  
  
"No; let me be the one to do it," Ada says, moving to keep the table between them. "It's a sure thing. Why not bet on a sure victory?"  
  
"This isn't just a battlefield, you are my _wife_ ," Chrom says. He rushes to catch up with her, caught up in the moment, and she lets him. "You've never sacrificed a unit before, there is no reason to start now!"  
  
"The stakes are higher now," she says, pointedly. He is so frustrated that he reaches towards her to grab her by the forearms, but she takes his hands in hers and holds them. He can see the exhaustion on her face, in the way her fingers grip his. She continues: "They will never be as high as they are now, and the solution is so elegant, Chrom."

He bristles.

"Elegant?" he repeats. " _Elegant?_ What does that even mean? The risk of losing you is not _elegant_."

As angry as he is, he's pleading, too.   
  
"It's my choice to make," Ada says. "And who says you'd lose me? Naga said--"  
  
"It's not JUST your choice," he says overtop her. "What about me? What about Lucina? What about our children? What about everyone that loves you?"

She looks at him so wearily, and he realizes that he's tearing up more than she is. For a moment they are both quiet, and Chrom looks at their feet. Gods.  
  
"Okay," she says. "Okay. Okay."

Ada lets go of his hands to clutch his face, instead, his cheeks in her palms, and for a moment they lean forehead-to-forehead, Chrom almost vibrating with anger. He puts his hands overtop hers. God, the mark of Grima on her right hand is so warm is almost burns to touch. He pulls away just enough to sit down, and Ada follows. He sinks down to the nearest chair, and Ada slides to sit on his lap.

"Chrom," she says, softly. She wraps her arms around his neck and presses his head to her bosom, and he goes with it. He grips her tight enough to leave indents in her skin, but she doesn't seem to mind. He breathes in deeply. His eyes are burning.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I know it's not what you want, it's not even what's best for everyone, but gods, I can't lose anyone again, least of all you. I love you."

"It's okay, shh," she repeats, "I know."

He holds her -- or she holds him, or they hold each other -- for some time, until Chrom is no longer struggling to keep it together, until she is slouched against him comfortably. He runs a hand along her side to her hip.

"Please don't do that to me," he says, finally, looking up at her. "Please."

She's looking across the tent, still stroking his hair with one hand, wearing a weary frown. Chrom finds himself struggling to catch her eye for the first time in his life, but then she turns to him with a smile.  
  
"We'll find another way," she says, and he feels a surge of relief. When she looks at him like that, he sees their daughter's same resolve and assuredness in the lift of her chin, the carelessness of her tone.   
  
Ada squeezes his hand, and he curls his fingers around hers tighter.  
  
"Thank you," he says. "Thank you."

They'll find another way.


	3. Portrait

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She's been gone a while and he worries he's forgetting what she looks like.

 

 

He is walking laps in the hall to ease his restlessness when he finds himself at the foot of a particular painting, eye caught by the subject like a snare.

At the foot of the painting of Marth and Caeda, Chrom feels something like a fist at the base of his throat. They are his ancestors far more ancient than the painting they are in, and who can say how true their likenesses are, but Chrom notes their appearances anyway. At first glance, they are almost like him and his wife.

He's tempted to turn to Ada and tell her so -- it is natural to _want_ to, given that they spent two years pacing these halls together, trying to stave off the boredom of peacetime when neither of them had ever been homebodies –– but she's not with him now.

She's gone. She's been gone for some time.

Chrom keeps his eyes up on the painting.

Caeda has a slight figure even in armor, and she has both hands clasped in Marth's, as if the two could not be split even long enough to pose for a portrait. Their eyes are locked. And though Ada does not share Caeda's smallness or the state of being at her husband's side, she does share Caeda's long hair, thick but straight, bright–

Chrom pauses to think.

No, he decides, Caeda's hair is certainly a touch darker than Ada's, more blue, and her bangs are cut straighter. But the image of Ada in his mind's eye seems hazy, suddenly. Isn't Ada's hair close to that colour, though? That exact shade? 

Doubt floods him. 

He finds himself staring up at the portrait for a moment, and then striding back down the hallway. His wedding portrait with Ada is down there, right by her empty offices, and he has his eyes on the frame from all the way up the hall. It's the only painting that exists of Ada, the only visual reminder that she was ever a person.

Yes. Caeda's hair is darker than Ada's. In the portrait, Ada's hair frames her face in a glossy sheet of turquoise, but her features are flat in a way that paintings so often are, confined to canvas and untouchable. She looks tense, eyes frozen in a vacant stare, and Chrom can't say how much of it is the artist and how much of it is Ada herself. She'd been so uncomfortable, being immortalized in some stuffy painting. She'd gripped his hand so tightly.

Chrom lets out a long breath he hadn't realized he was holding.

He remembers what she looks like. 

_But,_  a voice says, at the back of his mind, tiny but growing.  _If you doubted that, what else are you forgetting?_

Chrom stares up at that painting for a good long while, until he almost feels Ada staring back at him, deep from somewhere beyond the void, from wherever she'd gone, from wherever souls go when they die intertwined with a Fell Dragon.

Later, across the dinner table, he scrutinizes Lucina and Morgan's young faces, trying to find the little details gifted to them by Ada, but their hair is as blue as their eyes, and they laugh like him, and bicker like him and chew their food like him. He knows, crisp and clear, because Ada has pointed it out to him. She loved to tell him all about how they take after him, absolutely loved to.

Now, he wonders if the angle of Morgan's nose is more Ada's than his own, or if Lucina gets her ears from her mother, or if he's imagining it all or seeing only what he wants to see.

Maybe he  _doesn't_  know what her face looks like anymore.

"Father?" Lucina asks, and Chrom realizes that his children have been quiet for a moment. Lucina is watching him with a wary look, and Morgan looks just plain nervous.

"Father," Morgan says. "What's wrong?"

Chrom feels a tight sting in his eyes and that fist at his throat is back, and when he finds himself unable to answer, he forgets himself. He slams his fist against the dinner table suddenly, hard enough that his hand instantly hurts, and everyone around the table trembles in their own way. 

"I just––" Chrom starts, angrily, and then he quiets again just as fast. He tries again: "Gods, I just... I'm going to bed. Excuse me."

There's the scrape of chairs as several people push themselves to their feet, an ugly little formality that he knows draws even more attention to his outburst, and while everyone waits at nervous attention, he strides out.

 

 


	4. Dark Magic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tharja grieves in a way that catches Chrom between the ribs like a knife.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Just write sad shit all the time. Yeah, do it. Doooo it." -- my brain, probably

 

 

In his rooms -- their room -- there's a familiar face.

At first he thinks he's dreaming, and then perhaps that he's dead. Then, when she does not vanish when he blinks, he thinks that maybe his time has come, and all of his convictions have been answered.  _She's back, she's back, she's finally back_.

She stands at the window with her back to him, silky-haired and one hand on her hip, and it's her, he knows it is,  _he knows it._

"Ada!" he exclaims. 

She looks at him over her shoulder with disdain.

_Disdain?_

"I didn't think you'd be back here so soon," she says, in a voice that is not at all his wife's. 

The surge of joy dies almost as soon as it arrived. A million thoughts rush through his head, each more reckless than the last. If not Ada, then Grima, but Grima is dead and––

She's wearing familiar robes, but they're robes which are not her own. Ada has always cloaked herself in black and gold and purple, too, but never the revealing sheerness of a sorceress's dress, never exposed navel and high-cut thong. Ada was -- is -- always so conservative. Ada drapes herself in fabrics like she's perpetually cold, for utility, for whatever might let her swing a sword or mount a horse just a little bit faster.

"Tharja?" he says, feeling his heart sink like a stone.

"Got in one," she drawls.

He has a million questions, the first of which she answers on her own.

"I'm not doing this for you, you know," Tharja says, but it comes out almost in Ada's voice -- it is her voice, certainly, but not a tone that Chrom's ever heard Ada use. "I bet you'd like that, but I'm doing this for me." 

Of course she's doing it for herself. If Chrom's being honest, Tharja has only ever had two whims, and that's whatever she wanted and whatever Ada wanted. For the most part, the two things are one and the same, no matter how rarely Ada capitulated. Tharja could always want what Ada wanted, after all.

_Wants,_ he tells himself. _She's not dead._   

It's easier to tell himself that when he's looking at her, all long-bodied and pale, dressed in the sheer black and gold of Plegian sorceress robes. He's never seen her in that before.

Never seen Ada in them, that is. 

He has seen Tharja in them, and this  _is_  Tharja, even if she looks like Ada, right down to the slope of her eyes and the fineness of her collarbone.

"Why?" he asks her, because that's all he can say. He hasn't seen her face in so long, and seeing it again plucks at his heartstrings so deliberately that it's hard not to be angry.

"Because I can," she says. Tharja's whims, as always. "I miss her."

"I'm not going to put up with this," Chrom replies, testily, but he can't take her eyes off her. She looks down at him imperiously, again nothing he's ever seen out of Ada, but it's still her face, the bow of her mouth and the ridge of her cheekbones. "You have to stop this now or... or you're going to have to leave. I will send you away, Tharja, I will have you out of this castle by nightfall."

Tharja stares down at him with Ada's grey eyes.

"But doesn't it make you happy, in a way?" Tharja asks. "To see her face again?"

Chrom doesn't want to give her the satisfaction of an answer, so he turns away. 

"You can admit it, you know," Tharja says. "That's the point of dark magic. It's meant to touch your emotions, right where they're most raw. That's why it works so well."

"It's your magic," Chrom says. "Not mine."

"But you only see it as well as I do because you miss her as much as I do," Tharja says.

She's watching him. He doesn't like how physical it feels when she looks at him, like she's boring into his skull. She wants the reaction. Tharja always loves a reaction.

"No one misses my wife like I do," he says, very carefully, very deliberately. He doesn't like her knowing how much she's effecting him, not at all, but she needs to know how serious it is. She needs to know that he has  _claim_  on missing her.

"Chrom," she says, and she sounds more like Ada this time. Gentler. He almost flinches, but he does look back to her. Her features are perfectly Ada, and in that instant she could be real again.

Real.

"You're messed up," Chrom tells her, but he's moving back to her.

"I know," Tharja says. "But we're all that way."

She reaches out a hand to him. Chrom takes it, numbly, against his better judgement. Her skin is smooth, and her fingers don't have the same callouses they used to, but there's the tiny fleck of a scar on her inner thumb that catches Chrom's eye. He's seen it before, and kissed it so many times.

"How does this even work?" he asks, passing the pad of his thumb over that scar. "How do you even...?"

"You see what you want to see, mostly," Tharja -- Ada -- replies. "But the magic works from her essence. Her blood. Every bit of me right now is her."

Chrom pauses.

"Her blood?" he asks.

"Yes," she says. "A great deal of dark magic involves blood. And blood keeps, if you know what you're doing."

"Oh," Chrom says. Gods, he can't even try to wrap his head around that right now. He already feels sick. Tharja's hand is stiff in his, not at all friendly, but Chrom knows the feel of every tendon and vein like his own. Ada hadn't ever had much nice to say about her own hands, but he sure did. She'd just laughed when he'd complimented him, poking easy fun at the way he threw careless but loving words at her in hopes that something would get a smile out of her.

He always got a smile out of her eventually.

He passes his thumb over the scar again, and then, despite the tension between them and the discomfort of it all, he lifts her hand to his mouth and he presses a kiss there. No matter what else, that feels right, even if only in a selfish way. Tharja is stock still, but she doesn't pull away.

"I told you I'm not doing this for you," Tharja repeats.

"I know," Chrom says. He lingers, feeling the injustice swell in his heart. 

Is this what he gets for the rest of his life?

Or will Ada come back? Ever?

Shame swells in his heart.

Tharja pulls away from him, slow and easy, and she fixes him with an unimpressed look. He swallows hard. She turns away and heads back to the couch. He follows her like a lost dog, unsure of what else do to but trail after the image of his wife's ponytail, the fullness of her black skirts. He's seen Ada in a dress precisely thrice in his life, which he thinks Tharja ought to know, but he more he looks at her, the less he cares.

"Sit," she says. 

She knows she has him. Worse, she probably doesn't even want him. Chrom's not sure if he'd be happier with malevolence over this indifference.

Then again, it's more real to her if she has him, isn't it?

He does feel the intense need to hold her. It's hard to reconcile the myriad of feelings he has, watching her. She looks just like Ada, even though she sorely isn't.

"Tharja," he says. "May I just... lay with you?"

She looks at him like she's going to refuse him, Ada's lips pursed and her eyes narrowed, but then she nods, and she holds out that hand to him again. He takes it, and she draws him to her, down to the couch.

"No funny business," she warns.

"Nothing of the sort," Chrom agrees.

Still, she is surprisingly inviting, and when he lays out on the couch with her and wraps an arm loosely around her waist, she is the one who scoots closer, an arm around his neck so that her fingers can play through his hair. She is Ada, every inch of her -- the feeling of her fitted up against his side is almost enough to bring tears to his eyes.

"You're a wreck," Tharja tells him, and she sort of laughs, and he sort of likes it. And then she asks: "Did she lay with you like this?"

"Yes," Chrom says, even if it feels like something too intimate to feel right in sharing. "All the time."

"In this position?" Tharja asks. "What did she do with her hands?"

Chrom shifts, uncomfortable with the questions and yet devastatingly in need to keep holding onto her. Her stockinged feet brush his ankles deliberately, in a way that he might like if it wasn't so unlike Ada.

"Sometimes, but... no, kind of like--" he reaches just to reposition her, and he scoots up a little further, so his face is almost in her hair. He closes his eyes. He's sick. He's twisted.  "Like that."

The rise and fall of her chest is hypnotic. 

"Would she make love to you like this?" Tharja asks.

"Please," Chrom says, almost begging. "Let's not go there. Let's just... let's not pretend that much."

"Like I want you to?" Tharja snorts. "I just want to know. For me."

Chrom sighs, taking a deep breath. She doesn't smell like Ada, not at all. This close, Tharja is a concoction of spices and copper.

"Gods, I miss her so much," is all he says. She sighs at him, exasperated already.

And then the door opens.

Chrom stills, and so does Ada -- Tharja. Chrom sits up to look at the intruder, even if he knows it will mean none of them can pretend this wasn't seen. 

Frederick just fixes him with an eerily stoic expression. Chrom finds himself looking away, a little sick to his stomach.  _Sicker._

"Libra is looking for you, Tharja," Frederick says, coolly.

 "Delay him for an hour," Tharja says. She gestures at herself, at Ada. "This needs to wear off."

"No," Frederick replies. It's careful, but it's also very deliberately spoken. Tharja doesn't much like Frederick, Chrom knows, and she's hexed him more than once for ordering her about, but this time she just stands. 

"Would it kill you to?" Tharja grumbles. If he weren't so strung out on emotions, Chrom thinks he might have laughed to see Ada so surly. Instead, he just feels like he's slipping into a deeper pit.

"I have no interest in playing a part in how you mistreat your husband," Frederick just tells her.

Tharja strides to Frederick, quite deliberately, and as she draws close, Frederick recoils just the slightest bit -- Chrom watches him lean back on the heels of his boots.

"If anyone was mistreated," Tharja tells Frederick, "it was you mistreating her."

If this nettles Frederick at all, Chrom doesn't see it. Chrom just watches Tharja -- Ada -- all the way out, until the bob of her ponytail vanishes beyond the doorway. His eyes linger there even when Frederick fixes him with a stern look.

"Milord," Frederick says. "I will see Tharja out, but you are not to sit here and stew."

It's been a long time since Frederick ordered him about, but it doesn't surprise Chrom at all to hear it again, not one bit.

"Do I have a meeting or something?" Chrom asks, absently.

I wish, Chrom thinks, for the first time in his life.

"Come sit in the hall," Frederick says. "I will retrieve you shortly."

So Chrom does, feeling miserable for himself and thoroughly regretful already, and he sits on the bench just down the hall for five minutes, across from a bust of his mother, and when staring at her stony face threatens to drive him insane, he moves a bit further down the hall for another half hour. 

When Frederick comes back, he doesn't say much. He just beckons for Chrom to follow, so Chrom does, down a side corridor to where Frederick's quarters are. 

When Frederick opens the door for him, there's something in Frederick's expression that Chrom doesn't usually see, and he realizes what it is very quickly -- it's pity.

That doesn't sit well with Chrom.

Still, Frederick beckons for Chrom to come in, and Chrom finds himself being seated on the couch in the middle of Frederick's very spartan quarters. He is seldom in Frederick's quarters -- he's not sure he could have described it if asked before this very moment. Frederick sits across from him, his legs maybe a little awkwardly long for how low the couch is, his large figure somewhat hunched.

"Sire," Frederick says, softly, when Chrom doesn't make any effort to start a conversation. "I am very concerned about this."

Chrom isn't sure what to say. He's concerned about himself, too, and more than a little uncomfortable with his own decisions. He ends up just looking at Frederick feeling numbed and exhausted. What could he possibly have to say to that?

 "It's fair to be," he says, finally. That's all he can think of to say that isn't depressing as all hell.

Frederick gives up standing at attention. He scoots forward on his seat, close enough to be within reach, and he offers his open hand across the void. Chrom takes it, more out of impulse than anything -- he doesn't think Frederick has held his hand since he was a boy, and then only in crowds. It makes him feel like a boy again, too.

The pity on Frederick's face comes with concern, the crow's-feet crinkle of skin around his eyes a little more deep than usual.

"It is more than fair to be," Frederick says, "I think it is dire that I say this... and not as your knight, or as counsel, milord. As your friend."

_Okay,_  Chrom thinks. 

"Your wife's stalker," Frederick says pointedly, as if Chrom doesn't know, "is using dark magic in a way that is entirely inappropriate. For reasons I cannot fathom -- I suppose it would take some sort of insanity, but to each their own -- she is deliberately using it on you."

"I don't think it's that deliberate," Chrom says. "She doesn't really want anything to do with me. She's grieving."

He's never given much thought to Tharja's feelings at any other point in their lives, and before this, he had considered her an uneasy but welcome unit in the army, and that was it. At absolute worst, her obsession with Ada had made him nervous, but it had never  _worried_  him. He and Tharja were always such different people, and if he was being honest, she maintained a place in his army for what she'd done for Emmeryn. The rest was just noise, noise that he largely tuned out.

But now, losing Ada is the first thing they've ever had in common.

"She is grieving by wearing your wife's skin," Frederick corrects him. Again, the harsh reminder: he hasn't seen Ada, not at all recently. Ada is gone. "I only want to make this clear, sire: she is using magic to take on Ada's appearance to pretend she is still alive, and your desire to see her justifies it. Have I made that clear?"

"Do you think I'm particularly happy about this?" Chrom asks.

"No," Frederick says. "But evidently you are upset enough to play along, and while I cannot pretend to be even remotely an expert in dark magic, even I know that it is strengthened by the emotional state of its user.. and its target."

Chrom sets his jaw firmly, and it feels like the weight of an anvil is grinding down on his soul, cold and black and merciless. It's like Emmeryn all over again, sometimes, but other times it's crueler. Meaner. Your sister dies and you just try to live up to the example she set. They ask you to take on her duties, not replace her.

Your wife goes away and people start to expect you to move on, especially when you're the Exalt, and when you have children.

Gods, he's thinking too much.

"I am upset," he says. "Wouldn't you be?"

That holds Frederick's tongue. 

"Don't think I don't hate this," Chrom adds.

"I know," Frederick says, patiently. He waits for Chrom to say something more, but Chrom just looks at Frederick's knuckles and neatly manicured nails and tries not to wallow, but it's too late for that.

Chrom just feels miserable.

"Chrom," Frederick says. "You need to address this."

There it is. Chrom lets go of Frederick's hand like it has burned him, and he shakes his head so fast his neck almost hurts. 

"Don't even start," Chrom says.

"Chrom," Frederick says, a touch warning. "Your late wife's--"

"She's not dead," Chrom interrupts. "Don't say she's 'late'. Just don't."

(Of course, this is exactly what Frederick is talking about. Chrom knows that. Of course he knows that. He hears it every goddamn day.)

Frederick sighs.

"You refuse to even acknowledge that she may be gone for good," Frederick says. "Far be it from me to force your hand, sire, but if you cannot even face that, you will surely drown in this sadness."

"Please don't," Chrom says. "Please don't ask me to move on. It's hasn't even been six months, it's too soon."

"I am not asking you to move on," Frederick says, with far more patience than Chrom thinks he deserves right then. "I am asking you to talk about it."

Chrom clams up again. He's not even sure. He sits on that narrow couch and feels the phantom ache of his back from his fall on Grima's spine, and the very real pain in his heart from just thinking about this. 

"May I suggest something?" Frederick asks.

"You're going to anyway," Chrom sighs.

Frederick nods.

"You don't want to talk about Ada because you're angry with her."

Chrom almost laughs. No, he's not angry with her. He could never be angry with her.

"I really am not," he says.

Frederick isn't satisfied with that -- if anything, Chrom's choked little stab of laughter just gives him more incentive to prod again. Frederick leans forward again, peering into Chrom's face even as Chrom tries to be passive.

(What a joke. He's never been a passive person.)

"Do you not feel betrayed?"

"Well, yes. She lied to me," Chrom says.

Frederick pauses, and then he nods: "So she did. But do you blame her for it?"

"Yes," Chrom says, immediately. He's not even sure why, as he's almost positive until this very moment that he did not. "She's my wife. I told her we'd find another way, and she agreed, and I made her swear to me that she would hold to that. And she lied -- she did it anyway. She planned it all along."

"And you know that for a fact?" Frederick says. "You did not seem concerned she would at the time."

"I trusted her," Chrom says, still more vehement. "Or at least I trusted her word."

"You trusted all of her," Frederick says. "I did not see a shred of doubt in you, sire. If you had suspected for even a moment that she was planning otherwise, you would have prevented her from going at all... but you allowed her to face Grima."

Then the anger bubbles, unexpected, like a snakebite.

"Frederick, how in the hell was I going to stop her?" Chrom demands. 

"And she took advantage of that, I agree," Frederick says. "But was she  _wrong_  to?"

"Yes!" Chrom snaps. "And it's NOT wrong to take your wife at her word and trust her on it."

Frederick sighs, somewhat sympathetically, and he reaches to lay a hand on Chrom's shoulder. He speaks: "You did not think so little of her when she stole the Fire Emblem and struck you down." 

"I don't care about that, she knew what she was doing," Chrom interjects. "She knew that's what I would have wanted. And even if she'd killed me, it would have worked. We'd have still stopped Validar and had the Fire Emblem. She pulled it off."

"She knew there was a great risk of killing you, but she played that gambit flawlessly," Frederick agrees. "But we should not pretend she has not kept you in the dark to secure her plans before."

Chrom isn't sure who he's more frustrated with in that moment, her or Frederick. Then again, how cruel is he, to begrudge the love of his life for being just as selfless as he'd been prepared to be? How nasty is it to be angry with someone you love so much?

"I don't care about that," he insists. "I didn't die."

"But you would have found it acceptable to die as a sacrifice, uninformed of her plan," Frederick says. "And yet when she has forfeit her own life, knowingly and willingly, it is unacceptable?"

"She-- she  _lied_ to me," Chrom insists. 

Frederick sighs again.

"Would you ever have agreed if she had been truthful?" Frederick asks.

"Why would I ever agree to  _this_?!" Chrom snaps. He's on his feet suddenly, with white-knuckled fists and squared shoulders. "She gambled on her own head and she lost! And she's not even here to be the loser!  _I am!_ "

"Lost?" Frederick repeats, almost incredulous. Chrom has not heard that tone in a long, long time. "Milord, her sacrifice has given us life, and life to the generations that will come, far beyond a mere thousand years... And she may yet return."

"Nobody believes that!" Chrom shouts, right in Frederick's face. "Even I don't believe it!"

And then he's not only angry, he's furious –– with himself.

_Of course_  he believes she'll come back. He's been championing that cause for months.

"I mean––" He catches himself clumsily. He holds his hands out to Frederick, as if begging for mercy, as if trying to calm an angry beast, even though that's most certainly him. "I know she's going to come back. She has to come back. Naga said that if our bonds were tight, she would."

He feels as though he's damned himself, right then. How good is a bond if he is screaming in his oldest friend's face, damning his wife and condemning her to the weakness of his convictions?

Frederick just stands to his full height, broad-shouldered and open-armed, and Chrom just sinks into those arms like a boy again, choking back angry tears. 


	5. Rations and Trust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ada informs Frederick of her plan to sacrifice herself... instead of Chrom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't care about the timeline la la la la la la la la la. Back to pre-sacrifice! Someday I'll reorder these ficlets to be in rough order, but oh well.

"I need to talk to you about a rationing problem," Ada says. "If you have a moment later, that is."  
  
Frederick fixes her with a vaguely suspicious look, the corners of his mouth downturned. Chrom scarcely looks up from the table — he knows what doesn't concern him, and so does Ada. She watches Frederick carefully. His eyebrows cant a little lower.  
  
"You have fortuitous timing, as I need to run an errand," Frederick says. "Perhaps you could walk with me now."  
  
"Sure," Ada says. She runs a hand along Chrom's shoulders, gently, leaning over him and his seat. She teases: "Will you be alright alone for a few minutes?"  
  
Chrom looks up at her with a scoff and smile. He leans into her touch with good affection, his temple against her nose.  
  
"I'll manage," he says, and he turns his eyes back to the sheafs of notes and books she'd laid out for him. 

So Ada leaves his side, fingers trailing off the point of his shoulder, and she follows Frederick out. He doesn't hold the tent flap for her, and though his posture and expression are unshakeable, that's how she knows he's already cross with her.

She was prepared for that.

"What could possibly be wrong with the rations?" Frederick asks dryly, as she catches up with him. "I'm surprised he fell for that."

She and Frederick have not always been friends, and even after almost three years, he's still the master of the subtle barb when he's cross, a  _do you think so little of him?_ that stings, but Ada can predict when they're coming the same way she can predict an enemy's movements on the battlefield. They sting a little less that way.

"I need you to know something," Ada says, but Frederick doesn't reply, he just leads them deep through camp, past the mess tent and the makeshift stables, and out along the dirt merchant road that stretches alongside camp.

"The last time you wanted me to 'know' something," Frederick says, finally, "you confessed you would lie to Lord Chrom, steal the Fire Emblem and very nearly slay him yourself... all in the name of strategy."

"Was I not true to my word?" Ada asks.

"You were," Frederick says. "Therein lies the problem."

She nods, and she watches his eyes flicker to the gathering storms in the distance, the space just beyond the ocean where Origin Peak lays in wait.

"I didn't want to lose your trust," she says. 

She'd told him that then, too. It wasn't a good excuse then and it still isn't now, but it's true. Frederick had been furious, as any knight would be when carrying their lord's half-dead body from the battlefield, but true, she had preserved his trust.

 "I cannot fathom how you can lie to him but care about my trust," Frederick says.

 "He understands why I kept him in the dark," she reminds him. "You wouldn't."

Frederick doesn't reply again. He shakes his head, and after a moment of quiet contemplation, he finally looks at her, though he doesn't meet her eyes. His shoulders sag. He seems so anxious, suddenly, and not in his usual frenzied way –– quieter, more fearful.

"I can only imagine what you'll lay on me this time," Frederick sighs. "Is my Lord to die this time, and you wish to prepare me to fail in my duty once more — and more terribly, play party to it by  _allowing_  it?"

"No," Ada says. "It's going to be my death."

Frederick is quiet again, but Ada notes the minute relief of his face and swallows her urge to be offended. She cannot begrudge him his life's work. 

"What have you planned?" Frederick asks.

"There's a way to destroy Grima," she says, "For good."

"And you are sure it will come at the cost of your life?" Frederick says. He never wants the details — strange, for a man as exacting as he, but unsurprising. 

"Absolutely," Ada says. "I've hope that Naga will spare me, but that's beyond my control."

Naga doesn't speak to her -- never has, likely never will. The only god she hears is Grima.

Frederick nods.

"And Lord Chrom?" he asks.

"He doesn't know," Ada says. "As far as he's concerned, he's going to end it himself with the Exalted Falchion."

Frederick just nods again. They're both quiet for a moment, and they both look to the distance again. 

"You must think I'm a horrible woman," Ada says, not without a touch of amusement. "What kind of wife and mother plans this?"

"One who has trouble being selfish," he replies. "But the world is at stake, and I cannot judge. Not as a man of service."

Ada nods. Frederick sighs heavily.

"This will destroy him," Frederick laments.

Ada nods.

"He understands as well as I do what's at stake. It'll hurt him, obviously, but he'll understand." 

This, at least, Frederick understands. They may have some fundamental differences, she and Frederick, and they have been through difficult things together, but they both know Chrom. They both know and love him, and they know he'll be hurt. They both know he'll understand. 

Frederick glances back at camp.

"And I'm sure you know what a burden you have saddled me with? I will carry the truth of this for the rest of my life to protect him, when you die and bear no burden of it," Frederick says. There's a weariness in his voice, a shadow that makes her want to apologize, but she doesn't. She can't.

"I know," she just says. "But you have broader shoulders than I do. You'll be fine."

"Of course," Frederick says.

Ada wishes they were the sort of friends that comforted each other, and for a sore moment she feels both cruel and righteous in her action, but she swallows it as well as he does.  

"If I don't die," she says, finally. "Or if by some miracle my soul is saved... you'll hear a thanks from me."

"Why not now?" Frederick asks.

Ada lets herself give him the barest of smiles.

"Because you won't think it genuine until your job is done," she says.

Frederick looks away, but she sees the ghost of a smile on his own lips. He just nods at her, his shoulders set a little higher.

"I have much enjoyed our camaraderie," Frederick says. "A few short years ago, I would have laughed at the notion of some Plegian wanderer being the salvation of Ylisse, but here you are... One of the finest the halidom could ask for."

Ada's heart swells, but when she smiles at him, it's also to laugh.

"Is that a thank you?" she asks.

"No, madam — you'll have my thanks when the job is done," he replies, and that ghost of a smile flickers on his features again.

Ada nods.

"Tell it to my headstone, then," she says. "We have to plan for the worst."

Frederick doesn't say anything, and then he reaches for her. His fingers fall heavy on her shoulder, and Ada looks at that hand with some surprise. Frederick has scarcely ever touched her off the battlefield. 

"Ada," he says, soberly. "I have abided by your plans in the past, even when I do not agree with them. I intend to do so again. In return, you must do something for me."

 She looks up at him with some concern. 

"Will you please _consider_ telling Chrom?" Frederick asks.

"I will," she says, even though she knows she may not be able to honour it. 

 It might not be worth hurting Chrom more.

 Frederick squeezes her shoulder and then lets go, striding off back to camp without another word.

She gives one last look to the peak in the distance, at the blackness pooling in the sky above it and the great purple light beaming from the skies above.

She'll consider it, but fear pools ice-cold in her gut for the first time.

Then she follows him back to camp.


	6. If She's Really Gone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chrom pays Libra an apology.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More or less following Dark Magic. Libra is always everyone's Agony Aunt lmao.
> 
> I haven't posted in a while but I've been writing, still. I'm now at the point where it's more important to finish things instead of endlessly moving to another project -- I never polish my writing enough but practice is practice. "If you're having trouble writing 1000 words, write 2000 and keep the better half," and all that.

Chrom is relieved to find the church empty. Though he's here to see someone, the vacuity in that moment is almost soothing, a sharp contrast to the hustle and bustle of the streets outside, the endless buzz of the castle when court is at order. He can think here, perhaps, and tease out the tangle of thoughts in his brain, just him and the sound of his footsteps bouncing off the arched ceilings and through the empty pews. 

Funny, he's never considered finding peace in the church before. No, Chrom is not that sort of man –– he's most at ease with a hilt under his fingers and the burn of exertion in his muscles, and he's never been the kind to pray when he could be doing. Prayer hadn't led him up mountain faces and across oceans, or pitted him against warlords or conquerors or dragons. But here, confined to peacetime and making his way along the aisle, he's sure there's something to be said about the sanctity of the church.

He casts his eyes up to the great statue of Naga at the front, and when she stares back at him imperiously, he pauses. The contrast between cold stone and the warmth in her expression is almost intimidating. He imagines he sees her blink, but when he reaches to the back of his mind, where he sometimes images her lingering presence, there's nothing.

Naga hasn't spoken to him since the day they brought down the Fell Dragon. Truth be told, she scarcely had before, either.

"Lord Chrom?" a familiar voice says, from one of the small doorways off the antechamber. Chrom turns.

"Libra," Chrom says, relieved. "How are you?"

"Well," Libra says, easily enough. And then, a touch more glum, he adds: "I suppose this is about my wife."

Chrom hesitates, and then nods. 

"A bit of that, but mostly just to see an old friend."

"I'm sorry," Libra says, and his eyes look tired, suddenly. "I have asked her not to, but well..."

Good luck asking anything of Tharja, Chrom supposes. He imagines he used up his one and only request to her in asking her to join the army. After that, it all relied on luck, and he had long since run out. Marrying the object of her affections had probably drained her of any compassion for him, but he'd long accepted that.

Libra looks away. His shoulders seem more sloped than usual, and he laces his fingers together and folds them in front of him.

"I love her," he says, and Chrom isn't sure which one of them doubts that more. "But I fear that love does not temper her impulses at all. Her predilections for Ada will likely always hold more sway over her than you or I could ever hope to."

Chrom nods. Little by little, he feels himself grow tired, too, as if the exhaustion in Libra's face could mirror in his own. That Libra would even apologize to him suddenly feels wrong, and shame creeps into his heart. Libra and Chrom just look at each other for a moment, and then Chrom plucks up his courage.

"It's behind me now," Chrom says, and he pauses to gather the words. "I have to apologize, too. Nothing happened between us, but it still felt like crossing lines. I should have walked away the moment I realized what was going on."

 Libra shakes his head.

 "You must think terribly of her."

They share another long uncomfortable look, and Chrom finds himself looking away. He's at fault here, and by all means, Libra should be cross with him –– by indulging in Tharja's little masquerade, he let himself get carried away with grief, no matter how briefly, and intruded on a marriage that had never been peaceful, never been anything but fragile.

At least Tharja was predictable, a person capable of great kindnesses but never dishonest about her taste for the wicked. There was never any doubt that she would blend her more thoughtful spells and magics with a bit of violence here or there, and Chrom had seen her on many occasions effortlessly blend cruelty with kindness. He'd watched her pluck the eyes from a hare with her fingernails for the sake of some spell for thickening the blood –– saving Stahl's leg with a clot, Lissa had admitted, when her own magic had been drained. He'd watched her shed her own blood to summon Ricken to them when he'd gotten lost in the woods during a skirmish, and Ricken had hollered terribly when Tharja had deliberately bled on him just to see him squirm. And she had even returned Chrom's heirloom ring, the one he'd given to Ada as an engagement ring! She was certainly not irredeemable. 

Chrom had no doubt that she had done it each and every time for Ada, and for the praises Ada would inevitably allow for her. But she had done it in the service of someone else, too, hadn't she?

What had he done, in that room with Tharja, that wasn't for his own benefit? 

"I know you are still having difficulty with Ada's passing, and I have no wish to subject you to someone who will make your grief harder," Libra says.  "Would you prefer we leave?"

Chrom's already-soft heart softens even more, even if he feels the sting of that word: _passing_.

"No," he says. "No, no. Not at all -- I would never ask that. I don't want to ask anything from you at all, Libra. You're always welcome here, and I'd rather have her here than ever send you away."

Libra looks relieved, and he bows his head. 

"Thank you, milord," he says.

Chrom nods, and then, with a tiny fit of injustice, he says: "Libra?"

"Yes?"

Chrom pauses.

"Do you really think she's passed?" he asks.

Libra seems to catch himself, but he doesn't respond –– not to the question, anyhow. He gestures for Chrom to follow, and Chrom does, one numb step after another, down to the first row of pews. Libra sits, and so Chrom does too.

"It's difficult to say," he admits.

"That's... that's not exactly comforting to hear," Chrom says, and he realizes as soon as it leaves his mouth that he hadn't exactly come here for comfort. He'd come to self-flagellate, to stew where Frederick couldn't put him through drills, where Lissa couldn't haul him from bed with another agonizingly long hike with Lon'qu, where he wouldn't have to attempt to not be miserable when his heart screamed at him to be exactly that.

"I imagine not," Libra says.

 So what, then? 

"I thought about it the other day," Chrom says. "At what happens if she really is gone. I've been raking myself over the coals to accomplish things she would have wanted me to do, putting Ylisse back together again and strengthening our people again. To make sure no one is starving or cold or besieged, that our borders are safe from the threats that linger. And I do all those things, and go to bed alone every night and wait to do it again another day, thinking that it's temporary. A test. But then I realized..." 

He pauses.

"I realized that there's never going to be closure, if she doesn't come back. I'm always going to think about her. I could be a hundred years old and I'd still never know if that would be the day that Naga brings her back. For all we know, she could come back a thousand years from now, in Grima's stead."

And then, as if the thought alone could strike him dead from fear, Chrom says to Libra: "Please tell me that's insane."

"There is no way to know what will happen," Libra says. "I don't think I can tell you what you want, Lord Chrom; I'm a clergyman, not a voice for the divine or seer for things beyond our realm."

Chrom sinks against the back of the pew hard. He looks up at Naga, who stares down at him with unseeing eyes, the cored out pupils deep and unfeeling. No one has the answers, he knows, and it's unkind to expect them.

"Gods," Chrom says, and it comes out in a frustrated growl.

"But that said," Libra says, with a measure of care, "I do understand how that feels, in some sense, and yet I hold out hope it will be over eventually."

Chrom looks to Libra again. For a moment, he wonders what that's supposed to mean -- how they're alike, in any sense, with Tharja cruel and fickle but _here_ , and what he could be waiting to end. And then he remembers Ada, so many months ago, leaning against the tentpole and peering out at the yard of their camp, watching Morgan and Noire play some children's game with rhymes and hand gestures. Noire would fumble, apologies tumbling from her mouth when she missed some gesture, and Morgan would laugh and show her the way and encourage her to try again.

And Ada had said to him, low and displeased: "He's not going to leave her now."

After that, he'd realized that Ada wasn't watching the children at all -- she was watching Tharja, who sat in the doorway of her tent to watch the children in silence. Chrom had stood by Ada for a long moment, wondering how much of this new girl's unbalanced nature was trauma from being plucked from the hands of slavers, and how much was parentage alone.

Chrom looks at Libra with a dawning sympathy, only to find Libra looking a little amused.

"I just thought of a moment I had with her," he says. "She invited me to tea, and she asked me if I was sure if I were happy with Tharja. I told her that my concern was for Noire, and that as long as my daughter was safe and happy, she should not worry for me." 

Chrom's struck by the notion that he'd never spoken to either Tharja or Libra about Noire, or asked Noire herself about her parents' relationship. In fact, the only person he'd spoken a word to about it was Ada, and the two of them had ranted (not always kindly) about the absurdity of it, the discomfort of it.  But what had Chrom done, for all his talks of friendship? Ada had a story with everyone, even though she could be a little cool and sometimes even standoffish, but he had always kept his eyes ahead, on being a good leader.

It had been Ada who had said something, and she hadn't said much to him about it.

"I think it was in this very church, though a few pews back," Libra says, looking over his shoulder. "I wept for myself, and she said her part, spoke her concerns... but she did not make me feel guilty or terrible for taking on such a burden." 

"You didn't have to stay with her," Chrom says, quietly. "Noire would have understood -- she still would."

 "Yes," Libra says, "I suspect she would. But I also suspect she has some way to go before she has the courage to leave her mother — it would only be worse if I left before she, as it was before."

Chrom nods.

"I will see my daughter become a woman," Libra says, "and if I must follow Ada's example — to sacrifice my own happiness, for the sake of others — then I will endure. If not for myself, then for my child's happiness."

Chrom pauses. 

"What if it doesn't come, though?" His throat feels tight, bitter. "What if you spend your whole life waiting?"

Libra looks at him with a small, serene turn of his lips.

"I have faith," he says. "In both your wife and mine, and my daughter, too."

Chrom feels the frog in his throat swell. He feels his eyes drawn to Naga again, and this time, Libra looks up too. Together they look at the great statue with some mutual sense that maybe, just maybe, their faith will be repaid.

"Things will work out," Chrom decides. "They'll have to."

Libra nods, and bows his head as he reaches to lay a hand overtop Chrom's in silence. Chrom doesn't move, doesn't bow, doesn't budge –– he just keeps staring at Naga, waiting for some sign.

Somewhere deep in the back of his mind, he is still sure.

 


End file.
